HDR photography is rapidly moving towards being a mainstream technology. It’s supported by billions of devices, nearly all web browsers, popular editing software like Lightroom and Photoshop, social media sites like Instagram, and more. 2025 saw several important milestones, including numerous open source developments which may pave the way to finally address challenges in distribution which may allow HDR adoption to accelerate significantly in 2026.

Last year, I summarized key achievements in 2024. Let’s take a look look at what’s happened since then, and what’s coming next in the year ahead.

The best of HDR photography in 2025

There are have been numerous developments in the past ~18 months which give photographers the opportunity to make serious use of HDR. The collective impact of these updates is that we now have excellent support to edit and export HDR images which can be viewed as HDR by a large audience on Instagram and can be safely shared anywhere (even on devices lacking HDR support. We also have the ability to share these images with a very large audience (particularly on Instagram, where ).

Notable HDR photography improvements in the past year include:

• January: Web Sharp Pro v6 added significant new support for creating and sharing HDR gain maps, including support for Instagram and Threads.
• February: LRTimelapse added the ability to create HDR time lapse videos from your photos in Lightroom.
• February: The budget iPhone SE was updated with OLED. You cannot buy any phone or computer from Apple without HDR now.
• March: ASUS PA32UCDM introduced the first 1,000-nit OLED with high color accuracy for under $1800.
• March: Safari Tech Preview 215 added support for HDR images (including native PQ encoding in JPG, AVIF, and JXL).
• April: Google Photos app v7.24 added support for Ultra HDR JPG
• April: iOS 18.4 / MacOS 15.4 added support for Android XMP gain map encoding, which helps to support old Android images (those captured before the ISO standard).
• June: Adobe’s Project Indigo app adds powerful controls for capturing HDR images on a mobile phone.
• June: Halide Mark III beta adds “Process Zero” HDR support for natural HDR
• June: MacOS Tahoe adds options in the Digital Color Meter app to measure HDR pixel values on screen (EDR and EDR Linear).
• June: AVIF with ISO gain map support is now enabled by default in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Safari.
• June: Android adds support for encoding HDR images as HEIF gain maps (on premium phones).
• June: PNG 3rd-edition specification adds official HDR support.
• Q2: The Lenovo Yoga Aura became the first laptop to offer DisplayHDR TrueBlack 1000 performance. This marked the first time a PC offered a good HDR experience.
• Q2: 4th-gen Samsung 5-layer tandem QD OLED enabled the launch of several bright OLED monitors in the $900-$1200 price range.
• August: the Hasselblad X2D II became the world’s first camera with end to end HDR support, boasting a 1400 nits HDR display, 15.3 stops of dynamic range, support for encoding excellent-quality gain maps, and a resounding endorsement from the world’s strongest camera brand that HDR is the future of photography.
• September: Safari added HDR support to MacOS Tahoe, as well as WebKit for iPadOS / iOS 26 (which means not only Safari, but all browsers on mobile such as FireFox now support HDR photos).
• September: the open source library libvips (pull request 4645). This is important on its own, and helps power critical developer tools like SharpJS and WordPress Media Experiments.
• October: Photoshop improved 32-bit support in curves, histogram, and color picker.
• October: Lightroom adds HDR-specific options for “edit in” (Preferences / External Editing), including support to choose Rec 2020 colorspace for SDR or HDR, HDR Limit now offers more granular control as a slider instead of a dropdown.
• November: Krita began adding HDR support for Linux.
• November: Black Friday prices hit new all time lows for several high-quality HDR monitors, making affordability better than ever.
• December: The ASUS ProArt P16 laptop launched with a 1600 nits OLED display boasting Display HDR 1000 True Black and PANTONE certification, making it the first PC laptop on par with the Apple MacBook Pro for HDR performance and accuracy – while offering the perfect blacks of an OLED.
• December: The open source library Sharp JS is adding support for gain maps (via libvips). This wildly popular developer library gets 22 million downloads per week via NPM and is rapidly growing. It’s supported by Gatsby and is the default engine when using Next.js’ built-in <Image> component (or its image optimization pipeline), which means it is enabling support in other downstream developer tools. This could enable many websites to easily adopt HDR support.
• December 15: LR Android now supports HDR display and editing all Samsung S24 and S25 models. As with all HDR I have seen on Android devices, headroom appears limited to 2.3 stops in spite of displays supporting up to 2600 nits (iPhone offers 3 stops with only 1600 nits and Apple MBP laptops support 4 stops with 1600 nits).
• December: I added an AI chatbot to my HDR monitors, support, and info pages to help newcomers get set up.

Where is HDR photography headed in 2026?

There are many HDR improvements which seem likely to arrive in 2026:

• HDR Monitor options should continue to improve significantly
  • Multiple YouTube channels with access to Samsung at CES mentioned the company set its sights on 4k and 5k OLED monitor panels for 2025, with higher peak brightness being a key objective for 2026. If they deliver, this would likely translate into several new HDR monitors by May (as this is the side of their business that sells panels to other monitor makers). We should find out very soon, with CES 2026 in early January.
  • Expanded PC laptop support for HDR. We finally got a couple of great HDR Windows laptops this year, and that trend is likely to expand in 2026.
  • Prices should continue to decrease year over year (while options grow).
  • To give you a rough sense of where things are going in terms of computer monitors which can keep up with capabilities we already have in phones and TVs… If you ask ChatGPT “what is likely CAGR for monitors supporting 1000+ nits between now and 2030?”, it estimates a roughy 23% compound annual growth rate (citing several sources). That feels very plausible to me. Options are rapidly expanding now, but from a small installed base (Apple MacBook Pro has performed at that level for five years, but we only just got the first comparable PC laptop in mid-2025).
• Distribution support expands, helping to address the key barrier to adoption.
  • The recent support added to open source libraries (libvips and Sharp JS noted above), there is a good chance we start to see a nice expansion in the number of websites which support and preserve HDR when you upload photos. If you are requesting support from your favorite web platform, please be sure to note that I’ve linked many important HDR resources for developers at http://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr#developers.
  • The WordPress Media Experiments dev team is exploring adding libultrahdr to support HDR gain maps. This could significantly expand the ability to share HDR photos, as WordPress powers >40% of all websites. It is possible to workaround now (by using the “full” size option), but this would make it vastly simpler and add import support for derivative assets such as thumbnails.
  • Google’s open-source libultrahdr is expected to add AVIF & HEIF gain map support. This should help make it easier to transcode from iPhone captures (HEIC sources) and to encode much smaller and higher quality images (AVIF).
  • I anticipate adding AVIF gain map support to Web Sharp Pro.
• AVIF begins to replace JPG
  • As discussed in which file formats to use for photography, AVIF is poised to replace JPG. It offers higher image quality at half the size. It’s a great format for SDR, and for HDR promises to give us gain maps smaller than today’s JPGs which is great news for faster loading of websites or sending smaller files.
  • 95% of internet traffic is now on a browser supporting AVIF, and all browsers which support HDR also support AVIF gain maps. While JPG gain maps are 100% safe, we are getting very close to the point where AVIF can start to replace it. The long tail takes a while, so this is likely to be a long process that starts late in the year. For those of you are who pioneers, this is a great opportunity to get your website to load much more quickly.
• Wider gamut TVs. RGB mini LEDs are coming from Sony and TCL. Outside of laser projectors, this will be the first time consumer displays show nearly full coverage of the Rec2020 gamut (which is the ultimate target for HDR).

Beyond this, there are various rumored developments – but who knows what the probabilities are. So I’ll focus instead on my “wish list” of developments would be high impact for HDR photography should they come to pass…

Wish list: what else do we need for HDR photography?

I have no idea if any of the following are projects which may be in development or under consideration, but they would help significantly accelerate adoption of HDR photography and increase its value (in no particular order):

• Support for JPG gain maps in popular sharing platforms, especially Adobe Portoflio, SquareSpace, Wix, and Facebook.
  • These are the platforms I hear requested most request from my audience to get HDR support.
  • Please click on each above for a link to request support.
• Simpler / better HDR in Windows.
  • You can get great results under Windows, but it isn’t nearly as simple as MacOS (where HDR is generally enabled by default and great results are either the default or relatively much easier to obtain).
  • For example, there are 3 different brightness sliders: “brightness” for laptops, “HDR content brightness” is a secondary control for laptops, and “SDR content brightness” is a secondary control for external monitors. These sliders are not well described and hard to control. The HDR content brightness slider is especially terrible – I find it leads to clipping of HDR highlights on great laptop displays if you don’t adjust this slider, and it affects photos and videos differently. This is unnecessary – MacOS offers a single brightness slider regardless of which HDR display you are using – it’s simple, intuitive, and works very well.
  • HDR is not enabled by default even on great HDR laptops where the display is well known. This undermines the value of premium laptops and puts the burden on the user to be aware of these controls and how to optimize their display.
  • The Windows HDR Calibration app is more likely to degrade than improve your results (and seems to occasionally produce some absurd HDR headroom numbers).
• Expanded support in the Apple ecosystem:
  • Support for HDR photos via AirPlay on the AppleTV. This would enable a very simple way to get content onto the massive HDR display nearly everyone has at home.
  • Support for ISO-encoded HDR JPG / AVIF in iMessage. Apple already supports their own JPG gain map encoding (ie images captured with the phone), and being able to easily share images edited with Adobe software would significantly help share the highest quality images edited by artists.
  • Support to retain ISO gain maps for images synced via Apple iCloud.
  • An updated Apple Studio Display monitor with 1000+ nits support would bring easy-to-use, high-quality HDR to a much larger number of creators. Apple has been a consistent pioneer and champion of HDR since 2018, and a monitor priced for a large audience would help cement their already considerable lead in HDR display hardware.
  • Full utilization of ISO gain maps. The current support is welcome, but not fully optimal / consistent with the ISO standard. This can result in loss of brilliance for images encoded for >3 stops of headroom and lower quality when adapting to displays with < 2 stops of headroom (such as iMac). I recommend Chrome or related browsers like Brave for those of you using MacOS. It’s great that we have HDR support in Safari 26 now, but we need further improvement to get the most out of computer XDR displays and to support legacy HDR displays with limited headroom.
• Unlock full potential of Android displays
  • Android displays are currently limited to 2.3 stops of headroom in software. With the latest Samsung and Pixel phones offering 2600-3300 nits, the display hardware is capable of supporting 4 stops of headroom in controlled lighting (ie viewing indoors). By comparison, Apple iPhone offers up to 3 stops with 1600 nits peak HDR.
  • It would be ideal to see Android allow at least 3 stops of headroom. The hardware supports it, many computers already support 4 stops, and up to 6.6 stops of headroom is beneficial (which is already supported by some high end TVs which support the full 10,000 nit PQ spec – though there is no indication monitors or mobile devices will pursue > 4 stops anytime soon).
  • It would be ideal if the mobile operating system could also intelligently headroom when ambient light is very low and the brightness slider is set to low values (same for Apple, not an Android-specific concern for me). This would help mitigate the “HDR is too bright” concern voiced by those who tend to scroll a tiny, bright display in a dark bedroom (while still allowing full HDR in more favorable conditions). This was on my wish list last year for both iOS and Android and remains something I believe would be very beneficial for the HDR ecosystem to ensure users and apps do not resort to draconian measures like disabling HDR entirely. This needs to be addressed at the operating system level to ensure consistency, avoid redundant or problematic solutions by developers who probably do not often have sufficient expertise in these complex human factors concerns, and potentially to protect user privacy as leaking ambient light data may be a concern for “fingerprinting” where an individual is tracked by comparing several otherwise innocent pieces of data about the device.
• Support in Adobe Bridge
  • Adobe has done an incredible job adding support to ACR and all 5 versions of LR. However, if you use ACR (but not LR) there is no simple way to browse and manage your work as HDR.
  • Please vote for HDR support in Bridge (if you have comments, please write in your own voice – not copy/paste).
• Greater support for accurate color in monitors:
  • Manufacturers should ideally all offer a mode designed to offer the highest accuracy possible with the factory calibration. This is the default for smart phones, but computer monitors are all over the board in terms of design target and accuracy.
  • Apple and ASUS ProArt offer great color by default and BenQ has an optional “Display HDR” mode which brings factory results reasonably close. But beyond that, most HDR monitors are optimized for gaming and showing off lots of color in the showroom. They tend to have terrible color accuracy and could offer a better starting point by adding a display mode intended for accuracy. I would love to see Eizo get into the game, as they would surely do an outstanding job.
  • There is also an HDR working group at the ICC, and a standard for profiling monitors would be of immense benefit. However, such efforts are likely to take time (creation of a standard and then adoption in operating systems as well as 3rd-party profiling software).

And beyond this, we will certainly see many other announcements or enhancements for HDR throughout the year. There is massive support across a wide range of hardware vendors, developers, and individuals. We are clearly headed towards a time where HDR is a mainstream technology with widespread support.

How did we do on last year’s wish list?

If you review my wish list from 2024, we saw the following:

• WebKit / Safari support: yes! As noted above, further enhancements are needed – but this is an excellent start and significantly expands support for HDR.
• Transcoding support: As noted above, there was tremendous progress in open source libraries (libvips, SharpJS) and that moves us much closer to general support for sharing HDR on the web.
• ICC profiling: We do not yet have a standard, but I feel good about where things are going. This is probably the most complex piece of the puzzle (tough scientific questions requiring broad industry agreement) – it will take some time.
• More support for showing HDR photos on a TV: I’m disappointed we do not yet have support from major set top boxes such as AppleTV to easily share HDR photos on the great, large HDR display we all have at home. Hopefully we see movement here in 2026.
• Solutions for the “too bright” concern at the operating system level: I have not observed improvement here, but continue to maintain that it would be ideal for HDR headroom to be limited when viewing in a very dark room at low brightness (especially on phones). This simple tweak would significantly help address concerns from those who scroll phones in bed, while retaining the benefit of HDR elsewhere (ie avoiding draconian solutions like disabling HDR generally).

So overall, we saw significant progress on most of these goals! The HDR ecosystem is expanding and improving at a rapid clip. We are at a point where transcoding (preservation of HDR when sharing images) is the key barrier to adoption. Once we have more outlets to easily share HDR, it should show a rapid uptick in adoption.